Made by NZ developer Ironshod, ultimately Reverse Maze is a frustrating but overall creative and quite fun kiwi-made game.
As with an old favourite, Trials HD, world leaderboards and even personal highscores give plenty of replay opportunity and even though you’re cursing and yelling on every death, you can’t help but play it over and over again…
At first glance Reverse Maze plays like similar maze games on the iPhone such as MazeFinger by Ngmoco, where you must move your finger to get to the end of the maze without touching the sides. Reverse Maze more than differentiates from the crowd with it’s open levels, switches and obstacles but the big factor here is that you’re playing in “reverse” – what do you mean you didn’t need me to tell you that? Anyway moving on, you place your finger on a marker to move in the direction you want to go. Of course this tells your little pink thingy to move in the opposite direction, guiding it to the finish. One more problem to make things just a bit harder is that you can’t let go of the screen, you need to complete the whole level in one stroke. Often this means your finger gets in the way of your line of sight. While that does happen in many an iPhone game, it has a greater effect here. Fortunately this hasn’t stopped me from finishing any level yet, so kudos for that.
I may have forgotten to mention that you need to be extremely accurate with your finger movements; Reverse Maze requires absolute precision. Any contact at all with a barrier or obstacle and you’re dead, instantly. There’s a neat little stats counter in the main menu and by the end of my several sessions with the game I died a total of 639 times with a success rate of 4.6%. Butterfly pants was my most frustrating level, it took me 246 tries before finishing it. Let’s never speak of that level again shall we? Okay, good. I haven’t finished every stage so there’s bound to be a few nasties still coming my way.
Thankfully each of the four difficulties have the first level unlocked, allowing you to give a few other levels a try. Of course as you progress you’re introduced to more and more obstacles keen on taking you out. In this game butterflies are the enemy! Switches that open up new paths bring in some new challenges as well as those pesky direction-altering-switches and teleporters.
From top to bottom Reverse Maze is brilliantly presented with a very pretty futuristic vibe throughout. The music is consistent with this theme, matching the neon colours with soft outerspace sounding tunes. Each level design looks almost too perfect, of course I wasn’t usually thinking it at the time, more along the lines of who on God’s green earth came up with this monstrosity of a level! I love the attention to detail with names for each level along with the little zzzt, an eerily human-like sound you hear when crashing into something. Also packed into the tight little package that is Reverse Maze are fastest time world scores & 24 hour scores that appear next to each level when connected to the web. If you want to view the full list of scores, a link opens up in Safari meaning that you have to close and re-enter the app. This is a bit of a pain and would be more useful if accessible within the game itself. Friends leaderboards or even NZ focused leaderboards would also be a great addition.
Closing Comments
Reverse Maze plays on a gamer’s worst trait, the absolute need to finish a level. At it’s core it’s very rewarding and a pleasure to look at but please be prepared to lose a few night’s sleep. For a couple bucks you can’t go too wrong by picking up this game.
Released on 02/02/10. Download for $2.59 here.